


far beyond any road

by karples



Series: the grief cycle [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Background Adam/Shiro (Voltron) - Freeform, Canon Compliant, Canon Temporary Character Death, Depression, Flashbacks, Gen, Gen Work, Grief/Mourning, POV Keith (Voltron), Pre-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-24
Updated: 2019-09-24
Packaged: 2020-09-25 07:49:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20373241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karples/pseuds/karples
Summary: There is life in the desert, should you look for it.





	far beyond any road

**Author's Note:**

> title references "far from any road" by the handsome family. any and all geographical inaccuracies mine (for this fic to work, the u.s. southwest probably has to be like, three times bigger than it actually is). 
> 
> many thanks to pvwork and maddie for cheering me on and reading the almost final draft!
> 
> regarding the fic:
> 
> a well-adjusted teenager with a wide support network doesn't hop on a flyer and become a desert hermit out of contact with the rest of the world!!! i feel like the series implies that shiro had been keith's only real friend and pillar of support after keith's dad died, so then i started thinking: well, sometimes new grief can dredge up old, unhealed grief. so that's how this piece was born: a meditation on how keith's adolescence sucked.
> 
> as such, PLEASE HEED THE WARNINGS! here are the big ones:  
mentions of depression, subconsciously suicidal tendencies, a crock load of grief.

\--

There was a straight black road feeding through the base main gate and continuing ever-straight into the desert until the old Groom Mine, after which it significantly deteriorated in quality before merging with the Mercury Highway. At the mouth of the gate the road was still of runway asphalt. Keith contemplated spitting on it to offend the officer so courteously marching him to the entrance, but Shiro would have disapproved and his reach extended even now beyond the grave. So Keith refrained from misbehaving.

About two weeks ago Keith had turned in his badge, uniform, and access codes. Then he had signed a mind-numbing number of nondisclosure agreements regarding the experimental research to which he had been peripheral since he fell into Shiro’s orbit. With Shiro, the only possible direction for Keith’s aviation career and general trajectory in life had been up. Without Shiro, the fall was proving precipitous indeed. 

The final disciplinary case and ensuing discharge would have humiliated Keith if not for his newfound lack of ambition. Moreover Keith was coming to realize how little the Garrison figured in his heart. These three nearing four years, he had not made friends but classmates and acquaintances. In fact, when conducting a thorough sweep of his room, he had found it littered with the detritus of another life, useless to him now. What need did he have for posters and certificates and model aircrafts, and flash drives of class materials rarely used, and miscellaneous souvenirs? 

Suddenly he had been overcome by disgust for the evidence of his pale, pathetic, narrow existence, governed by rituals and strictures he could not rationalize. These he had followed, and for what reason? Why? Why did it matter if a corner of his bedsheets was untucked, or if he was five minutes late for class, or if his hair wasn’t cut? And standing with his rucksack on the edge of the great abyss which was to become his future, Keith wondered how this emptiness could have ever meant so much. 

Of course, Shiro had always been good at making something out of nothing. Perhaps that was why Keith had taken it for his own. Perhaps that was also why Shiro was gone. He had embraced it and he had walked into it and he was gone. 

The thought made Keith’s jaw ache. In the fully packed rucksack over his shoulder he bore provisions for being alone, including but not limited to: 

\- five days’ worth of clothes  
\- one hard drive of photographs of his dad and of Shiro  
\- three yellowed paper maps of the region and a compass in case the GPS failed  
\- a tablet with its corresponding charging equipment  
\- a heat reflective emergency blanket  
\- two water filtration bottles  
\- several emergency water packets and emergency food rations  
\- a well-furbished first-aid pack, “borrowed” from the medical wing

And lastly several Columbian clasp envelopes containing the following:

\- Keith’s birth and medical records  
\- his dad’s certificate of death and Social Security card  
\- his dad’s will  
\- his dad’s financial documents  
\- deeds to his dad’s property in the Sonoran desert  
\- a copy of Shiro’s will  
\- a copy of Shiro’s financial documents, for Shiro had divided what he had not bequeathed to his aunt Hisako, his former caretaker and sole surviving relative, among his small circle of close friends

Before Keith the road stretched onward, lined with shrubs so gray they looked dead. To his left was parked the red desert flyer which Shiro had passed on to Keith before entering quarantine for the Kerberos mission. Behind him, the officer spoke indistinct words and the gates rumbled. 

The sun was bright and heavy, burning on Keith’s face and forearms and the long road. Through sheets of heat he squinted at the shifting, uncertain geography of the distant horizon. His new circumstances seemed warped and surreal, as if he had not quite managed to suspend disbelief, or as if he were a vulture circling over the remains of a life. 

The people Keith held closest to heart had often gone searching in the desert--his dad, for falling stars; Shiro, for peace from the celebrity which had pursued him since that Saturn mission years ago--and the time had come for Keith to follow. There was no other path to take, no other place to go. This did not mean that it felt right or wrong, for it was neither. He did not feel vindicated. He did not feel weary. It was just obvious. Furthermore there was a kind of grief so total and ferocious that it scraped everything away; so possessing that once it lifted, life before appeared as life half-cursed. 

Keith had been here before. He could not divine where it started or where it ended or how he should escape it. Shiro had lifted him out of it once. But Shiro was not here. 

We have to live like this now, Keith told himself. The bold red flyer was almost painful to look at in the light. Then a bolt of anger struck him like lightning.

He thought, I don't need anyone. And for a moment he believed it.

\--

The route that Keith plotted wound westward of the Garrison toward Amargosa Desert, down south along the old border between what was formerly California and Nevada and finally into the Sonora. The day was well underway when he spotted the Grapevine Mountains beneath a slightly concerning congregation of clouds and Bare Mountain a scant few miles closer. As their bleak summits rose higher and higher in his vision the sun fell behind them, and the sky darkened rapidly into dusk, a curtain of blue shadow across the range climbing like the tide toward red peaks.

A rusted plate displaying WELC-ME TO -E--- POP---TION: --00 greeted Keith upon town limits. He ate at a cheap diner, ignoring the looks askance from white locals, and paid in cash. Upon returning the waitress set his change on the tabletop far from his open hand.

Her thinly veiled disdain made Keith’s mood even fouler, for it brought to the forefront of his mind memories of not only Shiro but also Keith’s dad, whose ethnicity strangers had struggled to place, knowing only that he was other than they were. Like Shiro and Keith he had endured his share of mistreatment or distrust or discomfort. Once, when a cashier rang them up in a hostile silence, Keith’s dad had explained, “Some people are still fightin’ old wars in their hearts, kiddo.” 

More than memories, however, there were un-memories: thoughts of conversations delayed that would never happen, moments promised that would also never happen. They would never talk about Keith’s mom, who she was and where she was from and what she liked besides the desert from which Keith’s dad had been loath to part, as if it would surrender its secrets the moment he turned away. They would never visit together the graves of Keith's grandparents in Nacogdoches or the white-walled one-story in El Paso that had housed his dad’s childhood, and they would never again feature in the same photographs. They would never spend any more sweltering afternoons hopping from taquería to tacquería, gorging themselves, driving home with the windows down, and though the wind would be hot with dust the speed would be cool, whipping their hair out of their eyes so when Keith’s dad opened the moonroof they could see the polestar...

The shape of that loss Shiro had carried as well. At the very least, Shiro’s parents too were gone. Furthermore, over the course of Shiro’s career in the Garrison, the health of his aunt Hisako had deteriorated so much that Shiro could expect to outlive her despite his short projected lifespan. She was the final bridge between Shiro’s generation and the one preceding, a line thinner and more tenuous than a cobweb, and already there were questions asked that she could not answer. 

And what of the questions unasked? Keith had never seriously considered what it was like to watch someone grow old. His only experience with death was that it was sudden; with time, that there would never be enough. With age--well, his dad had been young. So when Keith met Hisako and held her square hands and looked at her smile, so reminiscent of Shiro’s, he realized that someday he would have to watch his best friend and erstwhile mentor pass on at whatever pace his health set. On that day, Shiro would not be as old as his aunt Hisako was. He would be in his mid-thirties, early forties, smaller in height and girth, and his knees would be thin, his hands cold but soft. Keith would be there to hold them then. 

Or so Keith had thought. Clearly that plan had gone awry. He had not confided to Shiro this particular resolution; it would have been hurtful and unfair to Shiro. And anyway this revelation was most important because of what it catalyzed, a tectonic shift in Keith’s understanding of his own future: that at last he could conceive of a place in it for himself, for he could not abandon Shiro to weather it alone.

Outside under the crooked neon sign of the diner, Keith lifted his face to a dome of stars obscured by clouds as dense as pollution. They came quick and fast, shepherded by a harsh wind. After his negative reception in the diner he had hoped to drive onward through the night, but with the whisper of a storm in the air, no longer was that option possible. 

Still Keith could stand to put some distance between himself and the diner. After recharging his flyer he decided on a motel at the opposite end of town, a family-run operation like most businesses in -E----. Exposure to insects and the sun had damaged the outdoors stairs leading to Keith’s room, and the bleached handrail bristled with splinters. 212 read the number plate on the door, brass, tarnished brown, the surface uneven like a shallow relief map. The key was a rough fit in the lock, scraping with a sound like sand against sand; turning it was a delicate operation. Keith was afraid that the key would snap in half if he applied too much force. Somewhere in the darkness beyond him more wind was gathering. Then the door opened with a groan, and he dropped the rucksack on the floor before bolting it shut behind him.

Groping along the wall for a light switch, Keith spied the faintest crack in the dark where a window must be, with curtains drawn close but not touching. It was not bright, not quite a glow; it was the distinction between the ambient darkness of the night and the interior darkness of the room, which retained a smothered, stifled heat. The smell of mint air freshener, belied by that of tobacco and cigarette smoke, lingered. 

The light flickering on was garish and unflattering on the wallpaper and furnishments. Investigating the cabinets and closet, Keith discovered white towels alongside a faded pinstriped ironing board. His toothbrush he fished out of the bottom of his rucksack. 

Now only if dropping into sleep were as simple as washing up, which Keith found easy and mechanical--empty, thoughtless, practiced gestures. For a long while he lay sweating in the gloom, holding as still as possible, as if sudden movement would frighten sleep away. He felt it stealing up on him a few times, a sensation not unlike falling through the floor, or killing the engine on his Garrison-loaned flyer high above the gleaming bright blinding white drybed of Papoose Lake, plummeting as gravity tightened its grip and the horizon seemed to arch, swooping nearer to him, reflected sunlight and granodiorite and salt and sarcobatus, the wingspan of his shadow coolly blooming under him like that of a diving gull, and Shiro below and ahead on that apple-red flyer, thrusters kicking up a spume-like trail--and then Keith was awake.

This process he repeated indefinitely until he could not tell whether he was asleep or in a hypnagogic fugue state. Indeed time or dream or recollection had gained a kind of gauzy, unhurried quality, and one moment he was staring open-eyed at the plain repeating diamond patterns of the motel’s wallpaper; the next, his head was lolling on the armrest of the passenger seat in his dad’s car, and The Ronettes were on the stereo, their sound staticked by Keith’s memory moreso than the radiowaves troubled by the remoteness of their location--I’ll make you so proud of me/ we’ll make ‘em turn their heads/ every place we go...

Dim unruly evergreens of the Sierra Nevada crowded out the silver light haloing his dad’s profile, and with the urgency of a drowning swimmer Keith sought to keep his eyes open. Always, inevitably, they closed. How Keith regretted dozing on those rare road trips--missing the sight of the indifferent conifers and the jagged terranes thrusting upward and his dad, whose features were foggy and imprecise when the eye tried to focus on him, as if sketched by an uncertain hand...

Blinking, Keith registered the sibilant drumming of rain driven by gales against the roof and walls. His skin was sticky; his sheets, wet and tangled. He flailed his way out and barked his shin on an armchair, which he hauled to the window. There he staggered into it, dragging over himself a single dry towel, fully intending to rest.

An enormous green fly lay trapped between the perforated window screen and the pane. The sound of its tiny body impacting the glass was not unlike the rain: tick, tap, tap-tap. It stopped and felt its way with its trembling legs thin as an eyelash, then resumed. 

Keith rapped a knuckle on the window and the fly did not react, a numb and senseless thing overwhelmed by a change in its prospects which could not be averted, only suffered. Except change had not seemed so much like suffering with Shiro around to illuminate paths off the beaten road: for example they had once traveled to Carson City over a long weekend, only to find all the hiking trails closed until the day of their departure, and yet Shiro managed to salvage the holiday anyhow. 

Two days they spent in a motel not unlike this one, watching TV and playing cards (Keith was a year under the age limit for local casinos) and making what Shiro called “budget shabu shabu” on the floor of the bathroom. On the last day Shiro woke Keith before first light--“Our last chance to do what we came here for”--and together they trekked the steep route above the bowl of Marlette Lake, exhausting their supply of protein bars on the ascent. The undisturbed water was as mercury in the dawn, and set against that mosaic of cold radiant sky and pine and stone Shiro turned, smiling, and asked rhetorically, “Worth all the trouble?” 

As if any moment in Shiro’s company could be misspent. As if any moment with Shiro could not be worth it. And now that ready ear, that warm laughter, that easy comfort and encouragement and guidance--that lack of judgement for any number of Keith’s more embarrassing social faux pas--no more of it would come to Keith or anyone else. 

Shiro was dead.

Keith kept watching the fly, steadily. Tick tick, tap. Legs shuffling. Tap-tap-tap-tick.

\--

Come morning the strange spell broke and that towering insurmountable pressure inside of Keith eased. Out on the eastward-facing deck he could see the singed crack of light between the crown of mountains and the low clouds. Above stretched an endless expanse so dizzyingly blue that the eye flinched from it. 

To return his guest key, Keith crossed the courtyard to a separate cabin at the mouth of the parking lot. All around was the familiar scent of wet gravel and creosote, tarry and rich and mineral. The day so far was slightly humid, and low to the ground there hovered something more vapor than mist. It would be dried up before ten. Right now it was an additional pressure in the air, bearing down almost imperceptibly, like the world had grown narrower and suddenly there was less space for everything. 

At the front desk sat a young sleepy-looking person reading on a tablet. When Keith entered a flicker of interest passed over their features, though whether malicious or friendly Keith could not tell. A cup of iced coffee sat beside their hand.

“What brings you ‘round these parts?” they asked as they checked Keith out--in more ways than one, he suspected, but he had never been great at digesting social cues.

Keith shrugged.

“You know they call us the Gateway to Death,” they added. “As in Death Valley?”

“I’m not going to Death Valley.”

“Oh, sure.” The front desker nodded despite their evident confusion. With Death Valley being the biggest neighboring attraction, the motel likely received few non-truckers that were headed elsewhere.

What would Shiro say? How did he do this, chatting up cashiers and waiters and the internet company over the phone?

“I’m--” Keith sighed. “Heading toward Amargosa Desert. Ish.”

“Cool, what’re you planning on doing there?”

“Good question,” Keith answered shortly. He wasn’t being smart with them; he had no real destination in mind. He had been driven out by a feeling. He had left the Garrison knowing only that he had no future there and needed to get the hell away. “Look, are you--”

“Aaaand you’re all checked out! Thanks for staying with us, safe travels,” said the front desker, already reaching for their tablet.

Keith marched off, greatly relieved. He had not, he realized, properly talked to anyone since he exploded at the academic advisor three months ago for bringing up his rankings. The efforts of the on-base grief counselor Keith had also rejected: in an office that smelled like plastic the counselor had lectured Keith at length about processing grief, which would be a long labor, one that each completed at their own rate; but grief was not an excuse for him to misbehave. 

For the rest of the appointment Keith had been alternately sullen or fractious. What if the labor could not be completed? What if grief did not fade but merely slept until it woke again? What if he had to live like this for the rest of his life? And what of the life he had sought to inhabit, the life he had sought to make for himself, in the very image of Shiro’s life--what was left of it? What could withstand this? It had gnawed on itself and cannibalized itself, it had been dispelled, it had caved in, and in the end Keith recognized it for what it was: a mimicry. And he knew then as he did now that no one could teach him how to make a life.

The morning passed uneventfully. Perhaps half an hour’s drive out from -E--- Keith stumbled across the remains of the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad: dried wooden planks darker than sand, set amid shrubs like the struts of an ancient spine revealed by rain. The planks trailed the main road for a while onward, veering close to Amargosa River at its shallowest; and by noon Keith reached the gap on the map between spread-out townships dominated by wind farms and solar energy zones that could only be glimpsed from far off, the same faded and chalky color of a daytime moon.

Eventually he swung by a trucker’s stop to refill his canteen and stomach, sitting in the shade under the dilapidated logo of a fast food joint to stretch his limbs. Glinting trash had gotten tangled in the neighboring brush. Transport vehicles rumbled out of sight, and truckers touched down and left, and the whole world moved, and it could have been moving without Keith there, so calm and transparent he felt. Sheer. It did not matter that he was there. No one would remember that he had been there. 

Someday no one would remember that Shiro and Keith’s dad had ever been there either. 

The thought pushed Keith to his feet. Soon he hit the road again, his face stinging with sweat, his jacket collar and pits humid. The reddish-pink patch of skin bared by his gloves felt tight whenever he flexed his hands. 

The next few days followed in this drifting pattern, from Amargosa Desert into the Mojave, tracing the Colorado River into the northwesternmost tip of the Sonoran Desert. Without a routine anchored to specific days of the week--e.g. on Mondays I have Xenobiology, on Tuesdays P.E., etc.--time felt thin and shapeless and ample all at once. Truck stops and landforms blended together in Keith’s mind such that he felt like he had not moved at all. He meandered. He lost his way and stumbled across it again. He circled the same hundred or so acres, as if sleepwalking. 

Indeed it was amid this sere corner of the otherwise lush Sonora that Keith achieved his most complete--and yet incomplete--understanding of what the people he loved may have desired from the desert. Here the mind was prey to itself, yet despite its mirages it seemed to reflect back a perfect blank impression of the self stripped of delusions: devoid of fear, devoid of bravery. Present because it was already present, carrying on because it was already doing so, futureless because it had no destiny, nor was it promised anything. A certain costiveness or harshness of existence, and whether that harshness was the desert mirrored in Keith or whether it had been made in him who could tell?

A week passed. Creatures did not hide from Keith as they did before, or perhaps he had learned to see them: red racers coiled by the road, the silhouettes of black-tailed jackrabbits at sunset. Bats evacuating deep earthen vents in a night thick with stars. Purple martins wheeling and diving into man-made nest boxes near human establishments, which Keith avoided unless necessary. Briefly a memory came and went of a temperate afternoon with his dad in their concrete backyard, under the shade of a dusty canvas umbrella: “How come martins need us to make their nests for them?” Keith had demanded, watching his dad drill a round entrance into a hard-shell gourd.

“Well, a whole bunch of reasons. One being they get bullied out of their nesting spots by sparrows and starlings, another being that this has been the way for hundreds of years.”

“But can they really live in that?”

At that Keith’s dad had laughed. “When I’m done with it they will!”

That spring the promised martins did move into the modified gourds, which hung from a pole adjacent to the second-story window. Enchanted, Keith even brought in a gourd for his third grade show-and-tell, stuttering out an impassioned speech about birdwatching, conservation, and invasive species (the Powerpoint slide was titled PEOPLE (AND BIRDS) BEHAVING BADLY: BLAME IT ON SHAKESPEARE*, courtesy of his dad). The class gave him a standing ovation, and for a week Keith was not the weirdo who ate alone at lunch but the cool kid whose dad could talk to birds or something. 

Then Keith went back to being a weirdo, and the fall from popularity sort of shattered his eight-year-old heart. It was odd to recall that once he had been capable of feeling such hurt about how others perceived him. That keen sense of betrayal seemed to belong to someone else on the far side of the gulf of years. 

At any rate, given past experience, Keith had assumed that Shiro’s unwavering regard for him would be likewise temporary; but Shiro had not thought little of Keith at all. Shiro had thought Keith capable of anything. Shiro had thought so much of Keith, and Keith thought so much of Shiro too, in a different, wondering, yearning sense, like what Shiro would have thought about nest boxes, and Keith’s dad, and the parts of Keith’s childhood which he did not already know.

The Shiro memorialized in Keith’s heart would have made it about ethics and environmental responsibility and first contact situations, and Keith would have poked fun at his sensibilities--“Stop talking like a freakin’ grandpa!” Still--and thinking this was like tonguing at the socket of an empty tooth, expecting to find something that was gone--they had been so alike in everything that mattered. Their wants and goals had aligned or seemed to align so well that Keith had often felt that he was not hanging onto Shiro so much as walking beside Shiro, choosing the same choices, making the same decisions.

How could Keith make that mistake? More than that, how could he stake so much on one person? How overconfident he had been, with that second, dependable weight on the flyer leaning with him into the turns, sharing anecdotes, shouting over the roar of the wind, “When I’m gone, this will be yours!”

“Wait, what? You’re shitting me!”

“When have I ever done that? On second thought, don’t answer. But yes, the flyer’s yours--it’s a gift!”

“Shiro...”

“Oh, please. The way you sound, you’d think I just gave you bad news!”

Shiro had been right in more ways than one, in the end.

Keith was capable of anything. He was capable of being alone. It was no longer a matter of belief but of knowledge, for he had been here before. He had only forgotten how to be here again. And in this absence left in the self, of love vested outside of the self in things lost, things irretrievable, Keith understood that he could recover neither Shiro nor his dad nor any facet of his previous lives.

But at least he could recover this.

\--

Deeper in the Sonora, eastward of the Colorado River, the daytime temperatures banished most creatures to hidden dens beneath creosote bushes and tangled nets of white bursage like a smattering of green over dust. Desert bees crept into the openings in Keith’s sweat-logged clothes in pursuit of water, and a few times he was stung attempting to remove them. 

The resultant itching Keith resolutely ignored, aided in part by a puzzling, sourceless sense of urgency building in him. It was not that he was on a set schedule; in fact he had no shortage of time. Yet at the same time he felt as if he were running out of it. Perhaps he should have been more afraid, except he did not have the strength to feel fear; and that was a curious concept, that he required strength to feel, that he did not have the strength to do anything besides be present. 

Even then he was not really attached to the present. His mind kept retreating inward. He tried to explain to Shiro how it felt, this portentous pressure: “Like you really need to pee, but you can’t find the bathroom.”

“Hmm. Sounds like nature’s calling to me.”

“Ha-ha, very funny, Shiro,” Keith said, only to be startled by the thinness of his voice. After his disorientation faded he acknowledged that he did feel like he was being summoned, but still he was bothered by how easily he slipped into not-so-old habits buried deep, deep, deep, deep in freshly turned soil headed by a marble tablet--

The horrible flensing light had gotten to him. Keith stopped in the scant shade of a palo verde to hydrate. That night and the day after that he weathered in an inn until the turbulent surface of his dreams frosted into glass. 

At some point Keith diverged from the usual truckers’ route; whether by accident or design, even he could not tell. For ages between stops he went on with his thoughts alone for company and then merely himself, without thought. Indeed for the most part Keith’s mind was blank and got away from him. And then there was the desert: the stark shadows of great organ pipe cacti made liquid inroads into the dusk, stretching as he did toward some other thing beckoning, and the stridulations of grasshoppers rose from the omnipresent brush, and the noise of the flyer cocooned Keith in a weak bubble, easily perforated, such that even when surrounded by the elements he was reminded of his separateness: that here he was, at best, a visitor. At worst, an intruder. 

When the GPS finally went haywire near the thornscrub uplands, Keith detoured, ditching the road altogether for unmarked terrain. After all, going where others went had never served him well. While the remnants of his rational mind protested, his inhibitions had been eroded and he did not obstruct his own way. Moreover he enjoyed appropriating the Garrison’s lessons in wilderness survival to enable his recklessness, as a kind of fuck you to the establishment, although it was closer akin to shooting himself in the foot. 

Keith had always been reckless. He had been reckless even before the smoke took his dad’s life (“In fires, it’s usually smoke inhalation that kills a person. So remember--” “Get on the ground, I _ know_, dad”). Like that moment eleven years ago when his red rubber ball rolled into the street and Keith would/could/should have waited for the car to pass, except he was so sure that he could make it, and in the narrow span of time between the car swerving and his dad sprinting out from the garage where he had been hosing down his rustbucket ATV the world tunneled in and suddenly there were no other paths or directions Keith could take, only the one onward.

There was no escape. He had nowhere to go, no one to be, no one to see. He was in really bad shape. He knew it, too. Was it heat stroke? Was he dying? Was he suicidal as the grief counselor had suggested? 

Had the Garrison let Keith go so he could die outside of its purview?

Many eons ago, this place had been partly ocean, delta, swamp. Then it had been thickly forested with many inland lakes and river floodplains. That desiccating heat had not always characterized the region was unfathomable; something about the general brutality of the desert seemed deathless or everlasting. But was change not a kind of death? A death of circumstances?

Keith had come here determined to find something that he could do besides dying. But if he found death while seeking it, so be it. He would not stop or turn back. He would follow this impulse to its natural end.

With renewed resolve Keith pressed on, past billowing hills and plateaus, through desert corridors banded with light, the arid land rising slowly but surely in altitude. Particles carried on the wind abraded his skin, and grit collected in the furrow between nostril and cheek and along his hairline, where his fingers discovered several sensitive clusters of acne. He was starting to stink, or rather, he was starting to notice his own stink. When he chewed on his nails there was dust between his teeth. Soon he had no more nail left to chew. At night he huddled beneath the belly of his flyer and a glittering canopy of stars whose names his memory had retained from countless astronomy lectures--Gliese 205, Beta Orionis, Dhanab al-Dajājah and al-fawāris on its tail, trailing Keith into the dimness of dreams where Shiro’s hand indicated which lambent planets and moons he had visited on the rotating dome of an observatory:

“Well, Ganymede was a disaster, but the view was almost worth it. Er, don’t repeat that to Adam, he wouldn’t appreciate the joke--”

“Yeah, yeah.” Keith had never made it a point to engage with Adam; Adam was too aloof, too difficult to talk to. Keith suspected that Adam felt the same about him, for theirs was a mutual lukewarm tolerance. “Lock, key.”

“Anyway, if you keep this up, you could blow Tian’s Encke Gap record out of the water...”

That record had never been safer from Keith. Perhaps Griffin, Leifsdottir, or Kinkade, all of whom Keith had consistently overshadowed, would claim it. They could have it, he decided. The only records he cared about belonged to Shiro, though now Keith would never reach those either. Selfishly he hoped that if he could not touch them then no one else could.

Upon developing a rash to unknown flora, Keith began to shelter whenever possible in ghost towns or lone ramshackle structures closer akin to shacks than houses. Nature had long reclaimed these settlements, and occasionally pack rats would scurry over Keith’s feet, which squicked him until he realized that he was filthier than they were. Furthermore the buildings themselves posed more of a threat to Keith’s health than most other creatures did. Often blackened glass would be strewn across the floor, or the foundations would be faulty and compromised, and thick twisted snaggletooth nails that could probably transmit tetanus would spiral out of the seams of less intact cabins. Twice already Keith had pricked himself on one, cursing his lack of vigilance.

Thus it was only in the purgatorial limbo between destinations that Keith allowed his attention to wander. Resurgent thoughts of his dad’s property in the Sonora troubled his mind; without a designated caretaker in the intervening years, the house had likely reached a similar state of decay. When Keith tried to picture it, however, the scenes conjured by his imagination seemed hollow and indulgent, merely simulating disaster. 

Coupled with sleep deprivation, Keith’s daydreaming distracted him from the far more imminent disaster developing under his nose. In retrospect the damaged GPS must have been a symptom of greater latent dysfunction: first the engine coughed and smoked, and almost at once the rotors stalled, one wing dipping low, swinging the whole flyer about. A saguaro lost an arm as Keith threw his weight in the opposite direction of the downed wing to bring it level, raising a tall hissing curtain of sand which enveloped him. His plane of vision spiraled--sky, lichen-crusted outcropping, more tumult, more sky. When the flyer violently thudded to a stop against a boulder, small pebbles rained from above to ricochet off of metal with a sound like light hail: plink-plink-plink.

Bent over the dashboard, Keith did not dare to blink. On stiff legs he clambered down, dirt crunching underfoot. His jaw hurt from grinding his teeth. Opening his fists, he pressed palms marked by nails to the scorching hot carapace of his flyer. Its wing had scored the landscape, a bald and obvious scar trailed by numerous floral casualties, but it also had not escaped unscathed. On the boulder Keith could detect flakes of red paint, their undersides glinting silver.

All around in a circle vague hazy ranges and mesas rumpled the horizon. Printed maps mentioned a Mogollon Rim, delineating the southern perimeter of the Colorado Plateau, but if Keith were much further south the Catalinas or the Agua Dulce Mountains among several others were also probable candidates. It was more probable that Keith was wrong on all accounts. 

Aloud he said, or mumbled, or croaked, “Give me a sign. Any fucking sign.”

The flyer thrummed but would not restart. If that was a sign, it certainly was a bad one. His mood grim, Keith cast about for solutions. He had limited food and water supplies as well as a reflective blanket; of his potential options, staying put was most likely to ensure long-term survival. Yet during the struggle to control his flyer he had glimpsed what appeared to be a road cut or something approximating a paved path, coiled like a dark serpent amid dense plant growth and rock formations.

A shadowy hope rose in Keith. For the first time in a long while the idea of other people did not put him off, though he could not claim to look forward to it. Against his better judgement--at this point more than unreliable--he strayed from his flyer, venturing further when his initial search yielded no results. 

The fading adrenaline rush left a coppery tang in his mouth and a severe tremor in his limbs. He could not seem to walk in a straight line or stand upright, on the verge of dropping to his knees beneath the tyrannical pressure of the noontime sun. A strange, breathless thought occurred to Keith, as if placed in his mind by an invisible hand: I’m so close. 

To what? To the ground?

A single staggering misstep thrust Keith through a barbed net of chaparro amargosa, which pulled feebly at his jacket as if to warn or halt him. His gut floated, suspended, arrested. And then he was falling.

Keith did not scream or yell or cry out. Rather apathetically his clawed hands combed through the air, silently seeking purchase. Below him lay the narrow gullet of a canyon belted with material from the bottom of ancient oceans; overhead, the aching blue sky seemed to swallow or steal the corners of the world such that Keith felt as if he were plunging not toward the earth but into the atmosphere instead. 

For a second his eyes roved over the sun--a brilliant white halo, then a black disc the size of a dime. Had this been what Shiro had seen before he died on Kerberos? What did the sun look like from far-flung Pluto--another star, indistinguishable from the rest? 

The fabric of Keith’s jacket clapped in the downward rush. As his consciousness dwindled the last thing Keith was aware of was exactly that: a thing. A thing that called his name, over and over, over and over and over and over, in a voice as warm and friendly as his dad’s...

“All right, Keith, time for a pop quiz. If there’s an earthquake, what do you do?”

“Um, drop? Drop, and...”

“Drop, cover, and hold. Means you find a nice sturdy table, sit yourself under it, cover your head, and hang on.”

“Like this?”

Keith’s eyelids slipped shut. His arms rose, unbidden.

“Yeah, kiddo. Just like that.”

\--

Much to his surprise, Keith stirred to the distinct raspy cries of wrens.

He was curled on his side in a nest of splintered wood and shingles. A twitch sent him into an agony so intense that bile rose in his throat. Dried blood ran down his front and his forearms where his sleeves had torn, and bruises riddled his shoulder, but a ginger inspection revealed nothing that required expert medical care... yet.

A sizable hole marked the roof of the cabin which had broken part of Keith’s descent. Cool, argent light seeped in, illuminating pale columns of dust motes and a single balletic spider on a thread. White cloth draped over boxes and furnishments made the place seem ageless, stale, and removed from time--or perhaps directly displaced from it, straight out of memory. In fact, despite its genericness, the arrangement of the boarded windows and plain walls inspired the faintest spark of familiarity.

Keith’s pulse pounded in his ears like the tread of an approaching giant. After the giant thundered away, Keith peeled his cheek off of the hardwood floor with a groan that caused more pain than it relieved. 

A sliver in the door revealed the railing of a porch, awash with dawn. Beyond it, the oxidized handle of a water pump jutted from parched earth.

We have to live like this now, Keith reminded himself.

But with luck, he could make a new life.

**Author's Note:**

> *the european starling, an invasive species that threatens the purple martin, were introduced to north america by a man who allegedly wanted to bring all the birds mentioned in shakespeare's plays to the continent.


End file.
